We’ve made some progress on this: once you’ve connected your Google Contacts to Rapportive (http://blog.rapportive.com/address-book-inbox-together-at-last), then if you have several email addresses for a contact, we’ll recognise that the different email addresses are the same person, and show the same profile for all of them. This means you can “link” two profiles together by creating a contact in Google Contacts with both of the email addresses – however please note we could take up to a day to notice the change.

If we determine from your Google Contacts that two email addresses are the same person, that will be private to you – i.e. you’ll see the same information for that person from then on, but other people will still see them as separate. That’s because people often want to keep their personal and professional identities separate in public.

We know there are times when you want to link addresses together without mucking around with Google Contacts (especially if you don’t use Google Contacts for anything else!), and we’re still working on a way to support that.

We are also already working on a way for you to say “this email address belongs to me, associate it with my Rapportive profile” (obviously we’ll have to verify it really does belong to you!). That way people will be able to link together all the email addresses they use, if they choose to do so. (I use several email addresses myself, so I appreciate the need for this!)

Will update this when we know when these features are likely to roll out.

We’ve made some progress on this: once you’ve connected your Google Contacts to Rapportive (http://blog.rapportive.com/address-book-inbox-together-at-last), then if you have several email addresses for a contact, we’ll recognise that the different email addresses are the same person, and show the same profile for all of them. This means you can “link” two profiles together by creating a contact in Google Contacts with both of the email addresses – however please note we could take up to a day to notice the change.

If we determine from your Google Contacts that two email addresses are the same person, that will be private to you – i.e. you’ll see the same information for that person from then on, but other people will still see them as separate. That’s because people often want to keep their personal and professional identities separate in public.

We’ll definitely consider supporting Outlook if enough people want it. To that end, if you haven’t already, would you mind voting on this idea? We get a lot of feature requests (for which we’re very grateful!) and the votes help us to prioritise.

Let us specify what email addresses, social networking sites etc are shown. Could pull the data directly from Gmail's contacts, be saved on a server or locally. Several contacts have multiple email addresses and use one for email and a different one for managing various accounts. This prevents rapportive from being able to find their profiles.

We are definitely going to let you edit your contact records for other people. Right now, we’re working on giving you as much context as we can about your contacts without making you do the work of filling in their details, but we know that’s not enough on its own.

When we enable editing other people’s profiles, the edits will be private to you: in other words, if you edit someone’s profile, we’ll show you the edited version, but other people won’t see your edits. That’s because your contact data belongs to you, and we won’t share it without your consent; it’s also to protect the privacy of people who might not want their social network profiles being revealed in public.

If you have any ideas on how you would like this to work, please do let us know in the comments!

Me too! In the long run we want Rapportive to work in all webmail systems and mail clients. We’ll probably work on the most popular clients first. If you know other Thunderbird users, get them to vote here!

We’ll definitely consider searching automatically for VK profiles if enough people want it. Right now, you can already add your VK profile to Rapportive. First copy your VK profile address to your clipboard. Then in the Rapportive dropdown menu at the top of Gmail, click “Edit my profile”; then in the sidebar, where it says “add social network”, paste your VK profile, and click “Add”.

I'd like to be able to see the latest tweets / facebook posts / buzz from someone when their profile pops up on the side.

Maybe one effective way to do this would be to have an options panel within Chrome, where you can define which of the data pulled in is expanded and which should just remain a link. Also, you can use the options page to connect to services like Twitter / Facebook. This might help pull up protected tweets as well

We already show recent tweets: just click on the Twitter link in the sidebar and it’ll expand to show their most recent tweets. (I find this pretty useful!)

We’re working on doing similar things for Facebook, LinkedIn and other networks too. We’ll probably need to ask you to log into each of those networks before we could display information from them, and it will probably only work for people you were already friends with. We’ve got some ideas on how to make integration with social networks really useful.

I agree, support Mail.app would be awesome — we want you to be able to just continuing whatever email client you prefer. Right now we’re focussed on making Rapportive the best Gmail plugin in the world; in the medium term we will take what we’ve learnt in Gmail and apply it across other email clients.

That means it might unfortunately take a little while until we get to supporting Mail.app, but it definitely will come.

Notifications from Facebook come from ***@facebookmail.com. Rapportive should show information about the Facebook user who caused the notification, instead of about Facebook itself. If there's a filter that reads "NAME commented on a photo of you on Facebook" in the subject line, Rapportive should look for NAME instead of ***@face***.com. This should work with every other service, since their subjects are pre-formatted. Hope you implement this without the need to connect to every other social network, just a smart subject filter. Greetings from Mexico!

We already support this for Twitter. Next time you get a notification email that someone is following you, or has sent you a DM, check the sidebar: we show you that person’s tweets and any other information we could find about them.

Could you suggest how you would like this to work? We don’t want to run the risk of being confusing – if we show our sidebar, which is basically a contact record, next to the existing Google contact record, it would look a bit weird, especially if the data we have isn’t the same as what you’ve got in your address book.

What would you find most useful to augment Google Contacts? Or is the main benefit that you’d be able to search directly for a contact (as Michelle describes) rather than having to first find an email from them?

This is similar to Joe Aston's request to save Rapportive notes to Google contacts "notes" field. I would also like to SEE notes that I have stored in my Google Contacts "notes" field. It would be great -- and super powerful -- if these two fields could be synced.
Similar to Joe Aston, I use Google Notes field to record the history of conversations / contacts I've had with a particular individual, how I know the individual, personal details about the individual that are easy to forget but important to ask about when interacting with the individual, etc.

I work on a few sites that have Member Profile pages. It would be awesome to add the Rapportive sidebar to them just like I do to Gmail, or open an API where I could send an email address or phone number to Rapportive and it returns a JSON array of everything you know about that person so I could build it myself. Thanks!

There needs to be a simple, quick way to remind me to follow up or stay in touch with people. One click or motion would be ideal.

For example, a slider bar that I drag (a range of 1 day to 6 months would be good). When I let go of the slider, it auto saves and that's all I have to do. I then get an email or some other notification of the reminder.

This feature request keeps coming up in feedback emails! It’s a little tricky to implement, as we have to keep track of all the reminders for all our users, even if they’re not logged into Rapportive when the reminder is due. But we know how popular it is, and we’d use it ourselves, so we’ll definitely see what we can do.

In the meantime, check out a really handy service: http://followup.cc. You cc your emails to it, and it sends you follow-up reminders.